Sunday, June 19, 2011

I video conference often for work, and fret that I can only see one person on the other side of the call. Wouldn't this be easier and more natural if I could see everyone? Time to get creative and mount a fisheye lens to my webcam.

I started with a door viewer a.k.a. peephole. Fail.

Then I upgraded to a Vivitar 0.21X 37mm fisheye lens made for a video camera. Win. I estimate the "before" viewing angle at 75º and the after at 115º. More than 90 is what I was after (stick it in the corner, see the whole room), so this is very good.

Next I needed a housing; preferably one that was non-destructive to both the lens and the laptop. Below is a 1 1/2" EMT insulated bushing (the blue ring) super glued to a plastic faceplate. You can see I drilled holes through the ring so that nuts and bolts can hold the lens in place – the lens barrel has a concave shape, so friction in the lowest point keeps it stable.

1" C-clamps hold the rig in place on the rim of my laptop's display. The clamps should work on pretty much any laptop screen thickness.

Sure it interferes with the display – but that wasn't a design goal since I have a second display.

And of course since I'm an engineer, the housing started with a sketch. Total project cost was under $50.

Here are some other like-minded projects on the Internet that inspired me:

Thursday, June 09, 2011

The DD-WRT IPv6 tutorial is in the ballpark, but didn't work for my setup. See the section on 6rd for Comcast-specific scripts; for me, the script never succeeded on startup (I presume because the WAN wasn't up before the script was executed). Here's what actually worked:

In the web interface, Administration / Management.

IPv6: Enable

Radvd: Disable

JFFS2: Enable

Clean JFF2: Enable (this will format a writable partition where you can store user scripts)

Apply, and then reboot the router.

For some reason, nslookup 6rd.comcast.net throws a segmentation fault on my router… so the script below shows a hard-coded value IP address. The original script linked above intended to parse the result of nslookup.

Use SSH/SCP/SFTP to copy this script onto the router to /jffs/etc/config/ipv6comcast.wanup: